That's the impression I got from tonight's talk with Wieland. He treated the audience as a body who had inside info on the joke, and generally did not really back up his points. Unfortunately I didn't get to ask him questions. Ah well.
Wieland began by painting evolution as a central issue in apologetics, through the theodicy argument for evolution. He opened with a quote from Provine about how evolution disproves ethics and brought the whole discussion under the banner of 1 Peter 3:15 (being always ready to give an answer). Then he cited his own experience as an atheist in university, recounting his theodicy argument against well-meaning Christians: "Why pray for healing from cancer if there was cancer when God declared everything 'very good?' Certainly God loves cancer!" He also trotted out David Attenborough's atheism in what seems to be a slight criticism of ID ("it's not just enough to show people design in nature!")
He rolled out Romans 5:12, 1 Cor 15, Revelations (you need a perfect Genesis to have a perfect Revelations), Acts' quote of the "restitution of all things", Romans 8's curse, and even that old bugbear Mark 10:4. From Mark 10:4 he transitioned into blaming social decay on evolution. Social unrest, marital breakups and crime rates have been going up since the '70s ... guess what? It's because America introduced evolution into the science curriculum in the late '50's after the Sputnik scare! He compared Billy Graham's crusade in the '50's in Australia (which was a success) with his crusades in the '70's in Australia - which was a flop, because of evolutionary influence! - and in Singapore, which was still successful because Singapore hadn't included evolution yet. He rounded off the appeal-to-Christianity bit with a mention of Charles Templeton's apostasy.
He launched into the creation science bit with a classic bit on operational / origins. (He'd been on my nerves the whole time but it all went downhill from here.) He quoted MacInnis (a quotemine, I'm sure) to the effect that creationists knew that science could neither prove nor disprove Genesis 1. He went on to classic creationist icons - the Grand canyon, a rant about unrealistic toy Arks, Mt. St. Helens, rapid fossilization, Teepee fountains showing rapid mineralization. He went on to connect evolution with racism, doing a One Blood plug along the way, and even stated straight out that mutations don't add new information - acknowledging that "loss of information can drive evolution" with references to wingless beetles on windy islands. He finished with Haeckel's drawings and rounded up by repeating 1 Peter 3:15, ending with a sales pitch for CMI materials which were on sale outside.
He started Q&A time with a short spiel on dinosaurs. Dinos and humans lived together, he said, citing cultural memories of dinos in dragons, carvings on Carlyle (sp?) Cathedral and Cambodian ruins, and went on to the good old Behemoth, before dragging up red blood cells and soft tissue in dinosaur bones. Question and answer proper then started. Someone asked about Ron Wyatt, then about starlight and time. His response to starlight and time, predictably, dragged in the horizon problem and Russell Humphreys. Interestingly, it also references John Hartnett using a new framework called Carmelian / Cosmological General Relativity - I'm not qualified to take a look at it. KerrMetric? Wieland did also bring up redshift quantization. The penultimate question was one about the Ice Age, and all the usual arguments were trotted out. The final question was one about environmentalism, and just as I had gathered enough pluck to ask my own question - in my own church, mind you! - the time was up.
It's fairly interesting how much assumed common ground Wieland had with his participants. He knew that he was not talking to university-trained biologists with technical knowledge of evolution, but to a layperson crowd (about 50 of us) and I personally feel that he used that to full advantage. He didn't even touch much on hominid evolution at all. He took for granted that to have evolved implies the impossibility of ethics, playing off the usual confusion between methodological and ontological randomness - he definitely was preaching to the choir about that. I think that was also reflected in the questions he ended up fielding, which were a lot more related to the scientific bits of it. There was no questioning the foundation that had been laid - it was more how to defend that foundation.
And I didn't get to ask a question because I was too squeamish! Silly me. I think I have a good question for tomorrow night though: given his arguments for theodicy using no death before the Fall, how does that jive with God's use of carnivorous activity in Job 38, 39, and Psalm 104? Do you think that's a strong question to ask?
